What would a world without fossil fuels look like?

Our advanced civilisation is built on easily exploited coal, oil and gas. New Scientist explores an alternative history that holds lessons for us all

YOU are probably reading this on a piece of ex-tree. Felled by a petrol-guzzling chainsaw, it was carted to a paper mill in a diesel-powered truck. Or perhaps these sentences are on a tablet, with plastic components that started life as crude oil, and metal smelted with coke produced from the tar sands of Canada. Either way, the words are probably lit with electricity from a coal-fired power station. Maybe you are even sipping wine, grown with fertiliser made using natural gas, in a glass created in an oil-fired furnace.

The list goes on and on. Our civilisation is built on fossil fuels. We depend on them not just for energy but for all kinds of raw materials and even the food we eat. Weaning ourselves off this stuff is not going to be easy.

But what if there were no fossil fuels on Earth, or at least none that were easy to exploit. Would history have taken a different course? What of the industrial revolution? Would modern civilisation even exist? To tackle such questions, we must go on a journey that will carry us from medieval times into a counterfactual yet strangely familiar world. It’s a fascinating thought experiment with implications for the future of our own planet, as well as for alien civilisations.

A long time ago we weren’t too bothered about fossil fuels. Early civilisations sometimes used them if they were there ...

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